Learning to Draw Outside the Lines

What my art class has taught me about starting over

The One That Got Away

It has been just over a year since I signed up for a local art class. I had always wanted to “do art,” but it remained on my “I would love to do at some point” list for as long as I could remember. So when I found a Tuesday evening class held in the backroom of a pub close to home, I felt a bubble of excitement which led me to jump at the chance.

This desire to find an art class had been lingering for quite some time; it wasn’t something I wanted to pursue seriously but rather doing something fun and creative with my time. I guess this desire came from a small regret I have held since the age of 16, when I decided not to take Art as one of my A Levels. I distinctly remember that I chose subjects that looked good on a university application, balanced the “practical” with the “acceptable” and satisfied what I thought was expected of me. I had already picked my first two subjects and needed a third. Art was in the back of my mind but I eventually decided on Graphics and Design as it seemed to promise a more “useful” future than traditional art.

Practicality won out over passion but it soon became “the one that got away” because as soon as I had started my A Levels, I had regretted my decision especially knowing it was too late to change. Fast forward to my adult years, this regret stayed with me for a very long time, far longer than I expected as I would often hear myself say “I would love to join an art class” but never actually did anything about it….that is, until May 2024.

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First Strokes

Everything about this class made sense so there were no excuses to say no. At my first class, my teacher needed to understand my skill level and so, like every other student at their first session, I was given a black and white photo of three 3D shapes and was told to replicate it by using charcoal and the grid method (a method where a grid was placed over the real image, followed by a corresponding grid on the blank canvas to help create the shapes, focusing on one square at a time).

Not quite as simple as I had imagined but I surprised myself by the time I finished after almost 3 sessions. And I felt that little bit of pride.

From there, I continued with charcoal, thinking I had found my thing, until a trickier image threw me into frustration. The ease of the first drawing had disappeared. But I pushed through and surprised myself a little more.

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When Reality Hit

Then came my first oil painting. The image I chose was a violin next to a vase of sunflowers. Intimidating but beautiful. How hard could it be I thought but as I came in with a paint by numbers mindset, I was immediately confronted by the messy, non-linear reality of creativity. Mixing paint, how to find colour gradients, trying to see the image the way my art teacher saw it and trying hard not to see this as a simple case of just colouring in were all thoughts running through my head during every class.

That painting took me nearly two months to complete. I finished it, yes, but not without questioning my ability as well as my worth and even the whole “why I was even doing this”. When I got to the end, I remember the sense of relief. The pride was there again, super happy that I finished it but I felt more relief than anything else. Still, I chose an even harder image next, an Austrian landscape I had photographed on a trip with my husband a few years before.

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The Painting That Nearly Broke Me

That was the painting that nearly broke me.

Missed sessions. Rushing from my new corporate job in the city to get to class. Sessions of not knowing what I needed to do next. This lingering fear of whether I was even capable of painting something this grand. A sense of being lost and not feeling good enough. All the emotions I could think of which I certainly wasn’t expecting to feel at an art class.

But you guessed it, I completed it and I did so after almost five months. When I got to the end of this piece, I had this deep sense of pride mixed in with this confusion of whether I thought I could be capable of continuing.

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Finding My Rhythm

As I write this, I am still attending my classes and onto my sixth piece, a Thai sunset from my recent trip in April.

And you know what, I am finally finding a bit of ease and confidence in what I am doing, I am finally finding the glimmers of enjoyment in each of the brush strokes I paint and I am feeling proud that a year on, despite the continued doubt, I am still going.

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A Square on a Bigger Canvas

So why am I choosing this particular story to kick start my writing journey, aside from the ironic connection to the title of my Substack? Well, about a month or so after I started my art classes, I created my account with Substack knowing there was this small urge to start writing. Just as I hadn’t chosen Art at A Level, English Language was a subject I enjoyed but did not take due to the lack of “practicality” I saw at the time. I wish I had.

My “Coming Soon” post on Substack went up on 29th July 2024. It has taken me almost exactly a year get the words, the right words, out onto paper, after going through numerous different variations of what my first article would be, something that would represent who I am right now.

I believe this is the one. And I feel proud to get to this point.

This small idea I had in my mind a year ago was transfixed on wanting to talk about the personal, deep twists and turns of life, navigating this through the uncomfortable, but very important, shifts. And it has been through my art classes where I can see the small openings of how I hope this new journey will look like:

• I am slowly beginning to see the small glimmers of how I can focus on the process itself rather than rushing to get to the end

• I am slowly becoming open to experiencing the mess rather than expecting to get things right straight away

• I am slowly becoming aware about the importance of feeling comfortable with the uncomfortable

• I am slowly leaning into things I have never leaned into before, just because I can and I will

It isn’t just about the final art piece, it goes deeper than that; this is about the art that creates the art itself.

That, to me, is the most important part of this journey. The willingness to try, to ask questions, to challenge, to move through the mess, to innovate, to self disrupt.

This is my starting point. A square on a bigger canvas. Let’s see where it leads…as I have a great feeling of where this might be heading.

And my invitation to you? To join me on this journey of self discovery and self disruption.